We closed our Drop-In Centre on March 16, 2020. All our group programming ceased that day.
Our staff and board were committed to continue to provide services and support to our clients. Because of the generous funding from the Province of British Columbia through the Brain Injury Alliance, we were in a position to carry on, albeit in a different looking format.
We needed a solid support plan as everyone was having difficulty processing the information which was coming in at lightning speed, often from different directions.
Right away, we met with our Head Gardener who is a client of the Society, and our Peer Support Worker to plan how to move forward. We felt it was important to designate our garden program as essential service since it would become a source of food security for our clients over the year.
Our head gardener, Dewar, is paid through funding in part from the Brain Injury Alliance. He took on the task as always, with the greatest work ethic and enthusiasm. Normally, he has three or four assistants to help with the work in the garden, but over the past few weeks, his wife Linda, an employee at the Society in the Outreach Department, has been volunteering to assist him.
This is working out perfectly, as they can work together without having to social distance from each other, and one of them can go to the local nursery next door to get seeds and plants.
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, our annual Seedy Saturday event had been cancelled, which meant that a lot of the home-grown seedlings and starters that we usually get were not available. Powell River folks, being who they are, were actually giving them away online to whoever could come pick them up. We took advantage of that and have a lot of veggies now ready and growing for summer and fall harvest.
We have already shared the first cuttings of rhubarb, and people were very happy to get some of the first taste treats from the garden. We also had little seedlings growing in our windows at the Centre before this all started, which Dewar and Linda have been tending to with love and care. The little plants are now out in the greenhouse hardening off, waiting to be planted out in the garden beds.
This has been an excellent experience for Dewar and Linda to work together. They are re-bonding on a whole new level, with both living with an acquired brain injury from a serious car crash on the Coquihalla Highway. They are renewing their love through gardening in the time of COVID-19.
We also designated Jimmy, our Peer Support Worker, as an essential part of our service delivery and support programming. We worked with him on what would be the best way to keep in contact with our population. We have come up with several wonderful options, including old-fashioned telephone conversations, and new-fangled technological video conferencing. Getting all the clients on the same tech page hasn’t been without its challenges, but what has worked best is Facebook Messenger video calling.
Jimmy has a list of clients that he makes phone calls to on a rotating basis twice a week. From those calls, we get a list of participants for the video calls. It is heartwarming to see the reaction of people who haven’t seen each other for a few weeks, when they can actually chat on video to show each other where they are, and what they have been doing.
Jimmy has been working closely with the executive director of the Society to come up with a list of “things to do at home during COVID-19″ such as:
- New recipes (which has prompted a recipe sharing between clients)
- Suggested viewings on YouTube, television and Facebook such as the Louvre online, live cameras from Venice, live animal cams (everything from baby eagles hatching to lions and elephants in Africa)
- Re-introduction of some of our group programs such as Readers & Writers and Creative Expressions Art
- Create an Avatar (each week we will draw the Avatar experiencing an adventure that we will then write about). Avatars are only limited to imagination. We are very excited to see where this project takes us… to the moon and back no doubt.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Brain Injury Alliance for their multi-layered support and the Province of British Columbia for their financial support to the Brain Injury Alliance. We are able to continue our important work because you all care.
